The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

198 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

themselves ceased to be worshipped, the trees also ceased to be
cultivated, and so disappeared from a soil wherein they had been
but exotics. But the religion of the great mass of the people
remained rooted as it were in the soil, like the palm or the
acacia. It flowed like a strong current under the surface of the
theology of the State, contemptuously tolerated by the latter, and
in its turn but little affected by it. The theology of the State
might incorporate and adapt the beliefs of the multitude; to the
multitude the State theology was a“tale of little meaning, though
the words were strong.”
If we would know what the bulk of the people thought of those
deities whom the higher classes regarded as manifestations of a
single ineffable and omnipotent divine power, we must turn to the
folk-tales which were taken up and disfigured by the rationalising
priests of a later period, when they combined together in a
connected story all that had been said about the gods of the local
sanctuaries. Each sanctuary came to possess its euhemerising
[216] legend of the chief divinity to whom it was consecrated; the
divinity was transformed into an earthly king, and his history
was concocted partly out of popular tales, associated for the
most part with particular relics and charms, partly from forced
etymologies of proper names. At how early a date these artificial
legends first came into existence we do not know, but we already
meet with examples of them in the time of the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Dynasties. They belong, however, to the age when the
rationalistic process of resolving the gods into human princes had
already begun,—the counter side of the process that had turned
the Pharaoh into a god,—and their artificial character is betrayed
by the attempt to extract history from learned but unscientific
explanations of the origin of local and other names.
Here, for instance, is one which was compiled for the temple
of the sun-god at Heliopolis, and is contained in a Turin papyrus
of the age of the Twentieth Dynasty:“Account of the god who
created himself, the creator of heaven, of earth, of the gods, of